Marta Andersson

I joined the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University in August 2022 after holding faculty positions at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, and Södertörn University (Stockholm). I have got a PhD in English linguistics from Stockholm University. I am a discourse researcher with a special interest in questions at the pragmatics-semantics interface, particularly in the area of impoliteness and language aggression in online contexts, as well as issues pertaining to the cognitive phenomenon of subjectivity and its construal in discourse.

Impoliteness

Some of the questions I attempt to investigate include how impoliteness can be detected given (a) the transient nature of computer-mediated communication and (b) the creativity of internet users and the plethora of (multi)modalities involved. I am interested in using both qualitative and quantitative methods to determine what impoliteness is and how it can be conveyed linguistically and through means that transcend language strata. These inquiries have led me on a quest to investigate various online contexts/corpora and their peculiarities.

Subjectivity

I have studied subjectivity as an expression of causal relations in various registers of both written and spoken English. Using both corpus-assisted analysis and experimental methods, I came to both frequentist and probabilistic conclusions about how subjectivity is conveyed/is most likely to be conveyed in discourse. Further questions that arise involve potential fine-grained distinctions between different types of subjectivity expressions and their perceptions by language users.

Fields of expertise: pragmatics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, syntax, quantitative methods in linguistics

PUBLICATIONS

Andersson, M. (forthcoming). English in Poland. In: Bolton, K. (Ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes.

Andersson, M. (forthcoming). E-mpoliteness – creative impoliteness as a form of social capital on social media. Journal of Politeness Research.

Andersson, M. (2022). ‘So many “virologists” in this thread!’ Impoliteness in Facebook discussions of the management of COVID-19 in Sweden. The tension between conformity and distinction. Pragmatics. 32(4), 489-517. Open Access

Andersson, M. (2021). The climate of climate change: impoliteness as a hallmark of homophily in YouTube comment threads on Greta Thunberg’s environmental activism. Journal of Pragmatics. 178, 93-107. Open Access

Andersson, M. and Sundberg, R.  (2021). Subjectivity (re)visited: A corpus study of forward causal connectives in different domains of spoken and written English. Discourse Processes. 58(3), 260-292. Open Access

Andersson, M., Kurfali, M., Östling, R. (2020). A sentiment-annotated dataset of English causal connectives. Proceedings of 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW), COLING 2020, Barcelona, Spain (online), pp. 24-33. Open Access

Andersson, M. (2019). Subjectivity of English connectives. A corpus and experimental investigation of result forward causality signals in written language. In: I. Recio, I. and O. Loureda (Eds.) Methodological Approaches to Discourse Markers. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Andersson, M. (2016). The Architecture of Result relations. Corpus and empirical approaches to Result coherence relations in English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Stockholm University, Sweden.

Andersson, M., Ozturel, A. and Pareti, S. (2016). Annotating Topic Development in Information Seeking Queries. Proceedings of the 10th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, May 2016, Portorož, Slovenia, pp. 1755-1761​. Open Access

Andersson, M. and Spenader, J. (2014). Result and Purpose relations with and without ‘so’. Lingua, 148, 1-27.

Andersson, M. (2009). ‘I know that women don’t like me!’. Presuppositions in therapeutic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, (41), 4, 721-737.

Andersson, M. (under review). The language of threat: An analysis of Swedish online alternative newspaper reports on BLM protests. Pragmatics and Society.

Andersson M. and Greco, A. (under review). “We getting ready for my funeral?” - the prosody of self-and other-directed impoliteness in Jeffree Star’s YouTube product reviews. In: P. Blitvich and A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.) Influencers and ‘fans’: The pragmatics of affect and hate in the construction of social media celebrities. Pragmatics and Beyond. John Benjamins Publishing Company.